Regeneration Europe: Towards Another Europe

Extract

This special issue of the German Law Journal is devoted to the ideas of regeneration Europe, an initiative that calls for a new normative paradigm for the European Union. At its very core, regeneration Europe argues that the European Union should be more European and that it should more firmly reflect the European modus operandi of society. While it is unmistakable that the European Union is experiencing a crisis of identity—among the many other types of crisis that the contributions to this special issue highlight—it is hardly controversial to state that Europe is more than a market, more than an incipient political community or fiscal union. To its citizens, Europe is, first and foremost, a tangible reality. The difficulty in describing the Union's normative texture, or the “nature of the beast,” as legal scholars particularly enjoy doing, does not reduce its tangible reality. Cultural diversity, political pluralism and individualism do not necessarily presume self-referential indecision. As Jonathan Franzen wrote on the indeterminacy of the US cultural framework:

[I]t is fashionable … to say that there is no America anymore, there are only Americas; that the only things a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian have in common are the English language and federal income tax. The likelihood, however, is that both the New Yorker and the Georgian watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance, both have jobs that are threatened by the migration of employment overseas, both go to discount superstores to purchase Pocahontas tie-in products for their children, both are being pummeled into cynicism by commercial advertising, both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman.